digitial to 35mm slides for projection....... can it be done?

[maree_featherstonhaugh]

hello there,

 

in the middle of my 3rd year at nottingham trent doing photography and

interested in presenting my work using an old school slide projector. most of

the digital projectors i've seen seem to be faded out and cold. however all my

photos are shot digitally on a canon 400D in raw.

 

any advice on whether this is a good idea and if it can be done, how?

 

any feedback greatly appreciated!

 

Maree

[michael_darnton1]

For a start, to see the fancy way it's done, take a look at this:

http://www.ezslides.com/35prices.htm

[michael_darnton1]

As I think more about it, though, for you the easy way might be to make some really nice prints, and copy them onto film with your 35mm camera. That job is a snap.

[mendel_leisk]

A while back we went to a digital slide show:

 

http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00FDVk

 

We've gone to quite a few conventional slide shows at the same venue, but I came away impressed by the digital presentation. No idea what projector he was using, maybe you could contact the presenter.

 

Off-topic, the show was just amazing: he did kayak journeys, alone and with friends, of 3 major Canadian Arctic rivers. One of his goals was to find the sites of famous paintings made in the Artic.

 

The show ran long, the slides interspersed with occasional short videos. Not sure why, but all the digital slides were landscape oriented. On his journeys he utilized blankets of solar panels with a laptop.

[tibz]

It's a great idea and it can be done easily. Either buy a printer which you put a roll of film in and it exposes the images and then you send it off for processing or use a website like this one (link below) which will print and process them for you. You will generally get better colors with projecting slides than projecting digitally plus the resolution is about 20 times greater. Make sure you are using a good slide projector too, old crappy dirty kodak ones with curved field lenses and vignetting won't work out so well. Get good one, they're really cheap.

 

http://www.colorslide.com/

 

Medium format slides will be absolutely amazing especially if they're camera slides. Just a thought...

[tibz]

I think I was beaten to the submit button by about 40 billion people...

 

Sending off the digital files will cost less and have greater resolution than photographing prints (no hotspot). Digital is way behind analog in terms of quality and resolution unless you go all out ($30,000 camera) and even then 4x5 cameras are still better and cost less and are easier to use. Digital Projectors are abominable and are the least efficient data conveying media ever devised (that includes cave wall paintings).

[Alan Johnson]

How many? In the UK it's not cheap but can be done:

 

http://www.microquiz.net/

[SCL]

I did a slide show last year for a group of people who notified me a couple days in advance, that they didn't have access to a working digital projector, and they wouldn't be able to round one up for the presentation. I quickly called an on-line digital to slide producer, and within 24 hours (and about $60) I had a set of slides which I think were at least as good as the digital originals. I had to laugh, because one of the viewers was told me he thought the slides were originals shot with Leica glass.

[michael_darnton1]

Hotspots photographing prints? Something's wrong with your copy setup.

[JAPster]

Well, not one to like sticking a pin in other people's baloon, but a more efficient way is forget 35mm slides & 35mm slide projector. You are shooting the pictures with a digital SLR & producing hi-res full-color graphics files (picture files). Seems to me the simplest solution to projecting these is to load them on a presentation grade laptop, then use a simple program like Irfanview to either display them one by one, or create a canned slideshow file that you execute and just let it run. Then you hook up one the modern A/V projectors that will attach to any laptop, and display the computer screen image to the silver screen or even just a white wall. That approach would be much simpler and do-able than converting digital picture files to 35 Color Slides and then getting the vintage slide projector to work.

[robert_k1]

My experience with a highly recommended online service that converts my Photoshop edited slide scans back to slides was not positive. Even after lengthy discussing about profiles, etc. with the owner, the slides turned out very different from how they look on my monitor (or prints, which match the monitor displays), or the original slides. They looked "faded out and cold". They are much worse than the traditional slide duplicates, while I was hoping that they would be better.

 

The other concern I have with this kind of service is how my uploaded high resolution files are protected.

 

For presenting my work without a traditional slide projector, I would create a digital slide show and make sure that it looks good on a lcd/crt monitor. I have no idea how a lcd projector would influence the looks though.

[maree_featherstonhaugh]

thank you so much to all the replies! will work my through the options and keep people posted.